Life is hard as it is regarding Oracle licensing compliance. Then I’m wondering why, time and time again I see DBA’s download Oracle software from the Oracle Technology Network website to install on production servers.
I’m no lawyer or otherwise in any position to assess the legal consequences, but under no circumstances do you want to run your enterprise servers covered by the OTN License Agreement. These are the terms you agree on whenever you download software from the Oracle Technology Network website (here’s the current OTN license agreement as a PDF in case Oracle will break the link some time in the future).
As a general rule DBA’s should only download Oracle software from the following two sites:
To make matters worse the zip files from OTN do not have identical content compared to the ones from support.oracle.com (never mind the fact that the contents of all three sources may be different).
# file from OTN $ stat linuxamd64_12c_database_1of2.zip File: ‘linuxamd64_12c_database_1of2.zip’ Size: 1673544724 Blocks: 3268664 IO Block: 4096 regular file ... # file from support.oracle.com $ stat p17694377_121020_Linux-x86-64_1of8.zip File: ‘p17694377_121020_Linux-x86-64_1of8.zip’ Size: 1673517582 Blocks: 3268600 IO Block: 4096 regular file ...
Also, note that on OTN you don’t necessarily get a message digest along with your zip file. So, how can you be sure you got what you thought you’d get. On edelivery and support.oracle.com you always have MD5 and SHA-1 hashes to verify your downloads.
I hope, by now, I convinced everybody that OTN downloads are a bad fit for your enterprise Oracle environment. Thank you!